HIV is a virus, a member of the Lentivirus genus, that affects 36.7 million people and only 17 million of who are on antiretroviral treatment (World Health Organization, 2016). There is no cure for HIV, however a mixture of three antiretroviral drugs tends to be effective in controlling it (Lewis, 2011). HIV is a sexually transmitted disease meaning that it can only be transmitted via the exchange of body fluids with an infected person such as breast milk, blood, semen and vaginal secretions; however the most common type of transmission is sexual transmission (Lewis, 2011). HIV targets the immune system, mainly helper T cells (CD4+ T cells) and macrophages (Dotish, et al. 2014). HIV uses the chemokine receptors CCR5 and/or CXCR4 to infect the CD4+ T cells, virus using only CCR5 receptors called R5, those using only CXCR4 called X4 and those using both called X4R5; once the chemokine receptor has latched onto the virus takes control over the T cell using it to produce more copies of the itself (Coakley E, Petropoulos CJ, Whitcomb JM, 2005). Transmission from person to person is able to happen due to the fact that T cells are present in blood therefore when two persons exchange bodily fluids, like blood, they receive the T cells infected with HIV and then they themselves are infected with the virus. HIV is transmitted …show more content…
Malaria is a disease caused by parasites, in the genus Plasmodium, that are transmitted between the human population and female Anopheles mosquitoes (Carter R, 2001). Malaria is complex due to the fact that it can infect both humans and mosquitoes, however, it only causes disease with symptoms such as high fever, chills, and vomiting in humans mosquitoes are not affected by the parasite (CDC, 2016). Once a human is infected with the parasite, in the form of a sporozoite, the parasite grows and multiplies in the liver then moves into the red blood cells of the body where it will grow inside the red blood cells eventually destroying them and releasing daughter parasite that can go on to infect other red blood cells (CDC, 2016). It is at this stage where malaria symptoms would begin to appear – due to the ruptured red blood cells (CDC, 2016). Transmission from human host to mosquito occurs when the female Anopheles mosquito when ingesting the human hosts blood takes up gametocytes, the sexual stage of the parasite. (Lin JT, Saunders DL, Meshnick SR, 2015). Once the female mosquito has taken up the blood containing the gametocytes they mature in the mosquito gut, there male and female gametocytes combine to form an ookinete, a fertilized zygote (Cowman AF, Berry D, Baum J, 2012). This process occurs ten to eighteen days